Free at Last Monday, January 18, 2021, is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the third Monday in January of each year. In 1955, at age 26, Martin Luther King, Jr. was thrust into civil-rights leadership in Montgomery, Alabama, after Rosa Parks had made her courageous stand not to move to the back of the bus...

William Strauss and Neil Howe, in their 1997 book titled THE FOURTH TURNING, theorize that society has a collective personality that changes on a regular cyclical basis. This cycle repeats itself every four generations (every 80 to 100 years), with each generation having a distinct persona...

Robbinsdale High School, in Robbinsdale, Minnesota, a northwest suburb of Minneapolis, was at one time the largest high school in Minnesota. I was a graduate of RHS in the class of 1962. In the RHS class of 1961, there was a girl, Marlene Kringstad, who was named best actress of her graduating class. ...

When I was a kid, I always wanted to be a treasure hunter. I imagined it would be a grand adventure with the remote possibility of actually striking it rich someday. In my 20s and 30s, I spent my working hours sitting at a desk writing computer programs. At age 42, I turned my back on the rat race of big city life and spent about six years prospecting for gold in Central Arizona...

A recent article in a local Sunday newspaper asked several teen-agers what they would include if there was such a thing as a “Teen Bill of Rights” -- confirming my suspicions that most young people are about as clueless as a bag of horse feathers about the real world...

When I was in college, back in the 1960’s, I spent lots of time trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life. I wanted to be an architect or a mining engineer or a treasure hunter, depending on the mood of the day. Then I stumbled onto a brand new profession, called computer programming. It sounded technical, mysterious and lucrative. I decided to give it a try...

Life is like a box of chocolates -- it’s full of temptation and eventually becomes empty. The cacao tree, also known as “Theobroma cacao” to those who prefer scientific names, is native to the tropical, equatorial slopes of the Andes in South America. Theobroma is Greek for “food of the Gods.” The ancient Aztecs worshipped the cacao tree and used the beans as currency...

Lao Tzu Proverb: "The career of a sage is of two kinds -- He is either honored by all in the world, like a flower waving its head, or else he disappears into the silent forest.” Around 500 BC, Socrates developed a political and ethical philosophy in Greece, Pythagoras founded a mathematical, astronomical and philosophy society in Greece, Buddha expounded about Dharma and Nirvana in India, and Lao Tzu wrote the TAO TE CHING in China. It was an epoch of great intellectual and mystical evolution...

In 1980, I was a computer programmer and manager in Los Angeles, taking screenwriting classes at night. One day I learned of the existence of 12 pyramids (two rows of six each) that an orbiting satellite had discovered in a remote area of the dense Amazon rain forest in Brazil, near Peru. I decided to use this information for my first screenplay...

In the 1990s, Professor William A. Tiller created an experiment whereby a small black box was fitted with a simple electrical circuit and plugged it into a wall socket. Then four people who were highly experienced meditators gathered around a table where the black box was located in the center of the table. ...

In May of 2012, I had a personal health problem whereby I couldn't walk 10 feet without stopping to catch my breath. I reluctantly went to the local ER and was soon admitted (after a couple of tests) into the Fulton County Hospital with congestive heart failure and blood clots on my lungs. After about 10 days, I was released but still didn't feel very well. I was now on blood thinners and other medications...

Bob Brewer was born and raised in western Arkansas. As a youngster, his great-uncle introduced him to a mystery that included wilderness paths, hidden symbols, carvings on trees and rocks, and the topography of certain areas. The old man was the keeper of some sort of secret knowledge that he kept to himself...

[Friday is September 11, 2020 -- during the the morning of September 11, 2001, I got a phone call from my friend Mike in Minneapolis -- Mike quickly said, "Turn on the TV." then hung up -- I turned on the TV just as the 2nd plane slammed into the 2nd Twin Tower -- another turning point of infamy]...

I was once in the Eye of a Hurricane -- much excitement. By the spring of 1964, I had spent two years at the University of Minnesota, majoring in mathematics, vacillating between becoming an architect or a mining engineer, trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life...

Many philosophers believe that thoughts are deeds. If you project benevolent thoughts, you help create a benevolent environment. Projecting hostility creates hostility, etc. As we sow, so shall we reap. Cleve Backster, America's foremost lie-detector expert, hooked up a lie-detector to a plant about 40 years ago in an attempt to see how long it would take water to reach the leaves. ...

One of the fastest ways to fail in life is to work so hard your manager will think you're after his job. In 1976, one year before our semi-blissful marriage of five years, my ex-wife and I went on a sailing adventure in the West Indies. We paid good money to be deckhands on a 248-foot, four-mast schooner, island-hopping the Leeward Islands of St. Martins, St. Barts, St Eustatius, St. Kitts and Nevis for two weeks...

By definition, a republic is a union of independent entities, usually associated with common business and financial interests, favoring a restricted government role in economic life. After winning independence from the British in 1776, the founding fathers became engaged in a debate as to exactly what form of government the new country should take...

In 1909, Oliver P. Smith developed a mechanical rabbit for use in dog racing. He hired Edward J. O’Hare, a lawyer in St. Louis, to help patent the device. Smith and O’Hare placed the device in dog tracks, most of which were owned by the Mob in those days, in Florida, Massachusetts and Illinois...

When George Washington became President in 1789, life expectancy at birth for Americans was 34.5 years for males and 36.5 years for females. In 1801, when Thomas Jefferson became president, 20 percent of the people in the U.S. were slaves. Globally, there are some 1,800 thunderstorms in progress at any given moment and lightning strikes the planet 100 times every second. Lightning kills more people in the United States (400 per year) than any other natural disaster...

Recently, the director of communications of Taco Bell Corporation was asked to prepare a memo reviewing the company’s training programs and materials. In the memo was a reference to the “pedagogical approach” used by one of the training manuals. The day after the memo was circulated to members of the executive committee, the author of the memo was summoned to the office of the director of Human Resources and told that the executive vice president wanted him out of the building by noon. ...